Apple, Uber and Airbnb are overrunning incumbent product-push pipeline businesses by exploiting platforms and leveraging new rules of strategy.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, “Pipelines, Platforms and the rules of strategy”, the authors said in today’s digital internet environment, scale trumps differentiation.

“Platform businesses bring together producers and consumers in high-value exchanges.”

Platforms – major assets

In contrast to traditional product pipeline sales organizations, platforms chief assets are information and interactions, the sources of the value they create and their competitive advantage.

Using these innovative digitally-enabled concepts, HBR said Apple conceived the iPhone and its operating system as more than a product or conduit for services.

“It imagined them as a way to connect participants in two-sided markets – app developers on one side and app users on the other – generating value for both groups.”

Network effects

As participants on each side increase, network effects, which are central to any platform, begin occurring.

Apple conceived iPhone and its operating system as a conduit that could distribute numerous products and services.

By January 2015, the company’s App store offered 1.4 million apps and had cumulatively generated $25 billion for developers

Critical lessons

Apples success in building a platform business within a conventional product firm holds critical lessons for companies across industries.

Firms that fail to create platforms and don’t learn the new rules of strategy will be unable to compete for long.

Major environmental change

Today all businesses must understand that platform businesses such as Uber and Airbmb bring together producers and consumers, are gobbling up market share and transforming competition.

Moreover, traditional pipeline product-selling businesses that fail to create platforms and learn the new rules of strategy will suffer.

Today’s new rules

With a platform, a business’ critical asset is the community and its members’ resources.

Its strategy shifts from controlling to orchestrating resources, from optimizing internal processes to facilitating external interactions, and from increasing customer value to maximizing ecosystem value.

I had seen what most of you hadn’t. Be it the towering heights of Ben’s, the Collection of masterpieces, or the Great museum that held centuries worth of history… That is because I went to London.

I had a lot of help with little time. So I was referred by a friend who previously travelled to London to Bacall and Associates.

From the tower of London (which is a full structure) to the Somerset House, my adventures included a lot of strolling. Feeling like I walked through history itself, their Museums offers artifacts and countless treasures of the past.

Structures that became the Icon of London itself such as the Eye that gives you a view from the skies whereas people are small and the dazzling city seemingly so too. Another is the Big Ben, a clock tower that dates as far as the 1850’s which still stands today, so no need to bring a watch. The Big Ben took 34 years to build.

Another is the tourist spot of the Buckingham Palace, where 11:30 (or earlier to get a good spot as people tend to crowd), disciplined and trained, the changing of guards occur that served as the modern knights of London.

Westminster Abbey. Modernly known as Collegiate Church of St Peter, it is a historical place that held not only royal weddings in the past, but also burials of the kings almost a millennium ago.

The Victoria and Albert Museum. A destination that held artifacts from 5,000 years ago spanning from artworks, costumes, jewelry, ironwork, and photos.

Lastly, the St Paul’s Cathedral the largest and most famous among London’s many churches and one of the most beautiful in the world. The Architectural design that made it proved to be genius and made of hard work, though the Cathedral has a history of a fire that occurred back in the 1666 it was rebuilt.